Trunk Freezes for 1.4 Beta Tonight

Tuesday April 22nd, 2003

The trunk will freeze for 1.4 Beta just after midnight tonight (Pacific Daylight Time). During the freeze, only checkins approved by drivers@mozilla.org will be allowed to land. The tree will remain closed until the 1.4 branch is created, at which point the shift towards Firebird and Thunderbird will begin. The 1.4 branch is intended to replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, so several release candidates are expected. The ideal release dates for 1.4 Beta and 1.4 final are this Friday and Wednesday 21st May respectively. Read the updated Roadmap if you still don't get it. As always, tinderbox will give you the latest tree status.

The milestone schedule chart should also be updated to show version 1.3.1 and the 1.4 branch. Many users won't understand the difference between the 1.4.x releases and the 1.5 and 1.6 releases without that graphic depiction.

"The milestone schedule chart should also be updated to show version 1.3.1 and the 1.4 branch. Many users won't understand the difference between the 1.4.x releases and the 1.5 and 1.6 releases without that graphic depiction."

That's a development roadmap (for developers). I don't expect any users to get anything of value from that (or to even know that it exists). I'm not disagreeing that users might be confused about the various releases but a graphic like that one certainly isn't going to clear anything up for them. We are pretty clear on the front page download section. The breakdown is something like this:

1.0.x for people that are completely happy with the feature set and stability from a year ago and don't want or need additional features or even major bugfixes.
1.3.x the latest feature release. You want this if you want the best that mozilla.org has to offer in the way of features and stability.
1.4a/b our latest alpha and beta releases for people that like to beta test new and probably buggy features.
nightly builds for people contributing regularly to Mozilla development and testing.

for the 1.x.x releases, if you have the 1.x release you won't find anything substantially new in the 1.x.x release but if you can afford the download then you should get it for security, stability and correctness fixes.

What I noticed before Mozilla 1.0 was released was that non-developers equated the graphic with the roadmap. They would go to Slashdot and other sites and say "The roadmap says X", when the only indication of X was the graphic. It seems that most people's understanding of Mozilla's future plans are either the graphic alone, or the explanation they read from people who looked at only the graphic.

If the graphic isn't updated, all those people will be completely confused. For most users, the explanation in the download section is all they will see (if they even see that) and won't get confused. The graphic update is needed for the Slashdot/MozillaZine crowd, not the casual users.

Please, for the love of all that's good and holy, fix this DOM regression. I was trying to make a XUL game and do some other fun stuff, but something got completely broken last August and still AFAIK hasn't been fixed. My "test cases" worked great in 1.0.x but in more recent builds they're just screwed up.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185432

I think Mozilla+XUL has a real possibility as a platform for cross-platform edutainment software, but this bug makes that *completely* impractical. I can't believe no one else has been seriously bitten by it, but there are very few comments attached.

Firebird and Thunderbird will run on the GRE. The GRE allows the applications to share what is loaded into memory and only load the pieces of the GRE that aren't already in memory. So you start Firebird and it loads whatever parts of the GRE it needs. Then launch Thunderbird. Thunderbird will share whatever parts of the GRE are already in the memory and only take extra memory for the parts that aren't loaded. Memory consumption running both should be at most what the Mozilla suite uses now and most likely less thanks to the optimization being done with Firebird and Thunderbird.

The memory footprint will then be quite similar to the one you get when running two copies of Mozilla with different profiles. Still that seems to be *more* memory (a.k.a. bloat), not less. Other than the in-memory copy of the executables' "text" section, nothing else is shared.

Ever since I installed v1.3 I'm having trouble with broken graphics and general 404 issues. For instance, when I submit a quick vote on CNN it comes up File Not Found. Also, graphics links are broken on some sites yet IE loads them fine. I installed v1.4a hoping it would go away but I'm still getting 404's. Anyone else having problems like this?